Sunday 25 September 2011

Mounting Novel Netware Drives, How?

Dear lazy web, I figured someone might have some suggestions in this area. I was recently employed (half-time) in education and they use Novell Netware for network drives and I was wondering how to connect to them from Fedora. From what I know the server's SUSE based, uses LDAP for authentication, no IPX, I need to be able to specify context and server IP (the tree-based login currently does not work as the admin does not know yet how to make it work for two separate networks managed by one server). I tried some of the novell-related packages in fedora, but never succeeded in authentication, probably because it's built with IPX support and without LDAP support…

Anyone has any suggestions?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Witaj!

Since Novell Netware 6 the default Netware network protocol is TCP/IP. But before that it was ipx, much faster than TCP/IP but also much less capable of transmitting big packets. As you write of Netware and Suse you must either decide you write of Netware or of SUSE as they are totaly different operating systems. Have you got ipxutil installed?

pozdrawiam

a-1-at-wp.pl

Martin said...

@Anonymous: I'm not sure exactly about the server side, but AFAIK the Novell OES2 is running inside the SUSE install (probably as virtual machine) and is set-up for LDAP based authentication. What I'd like to know is how to connect to it from Fedora. Yes, I have ipxutil installed but that doesn't matter since the protocol used is TCP/IP, right?

Gerben Welter said...

Martin, use the ncpmount tool to mount the remote NSS-drives from the OES 2 server. I'm not sure if Fedora has ncpmount available.

FYI, although it's possible to run Netware in a XEN VM in Suse, you're probably dealing with a Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 installation which is based on Suse and has the Novell products running natively.

Martin said...

@Gerben Welter: Fedora has ncpmount but without LDAP support. I tried it before (even before I new what protocol for auth I should be using...) and it always failed on authentication. As for the server, yes, it's Novell OES2.

Anonymous said...

Hi Martin,

Not sure how your Novell admin feels about SMB/CIFS, but we used to enable it on our Novell 6.5 servers. Of course, this wasn't OES on linux (we ran the last Netware kernel before everything started to move towards SLES). Maybe it's just Samba now?

Regardless, it may make things much simpler if they are willing to enable it. I had a script that just used smbmount to mount my novell drives.

-Tim